The situation is the "crisis," not the pregnancy

The U.K.’s Alliance of Pro-Life Students (APS) released an eye-opening perspective piece written by a pregnancy center volunteer who has interacted with hundreds of women seeking abortions. Her experience shatters common perceptions painted by the abortion movement, which suggest that virtually all women who undergo abortions do so as an exercise of their own free will and rights. On the contrary, according to APS’s anonymous guest blogger, “the word ‘choice’ is often the last word a woman in a crisis pregnancy feels applies to her when she’s looking for an abortion.”

The volunteer enumerates the many reasons that motivate women to seek abortion. Indeed compelling, the reasons indicate that these women are certainly in crisis. But not, the volunteer explains, because they are pregnant. Rather, the crisis is the reaction of those closest in their lives to the news. “The crisis,” she says, “is the fact that her workplace is prejudiced against pregnant women, or that she feels she has to do what her partner says, or that she is not financially stable, or that her boyfriend won’t commit, or that she is in an abusive relationship, or that she is being threatened with homelessness.”

Pregnancy magnifies these tragedies in the woman’s life, and the natural conclusion for many is that by eliminating the preborn child, the crisis will go away. In reality, the crisis remains without the child who seems to be exacerbating her ordeal. The writer shares the story of a woman who was utterly under the control of her child’s father. He had the power to have her deported or ejected penniless onto the streets. “She was completely dependent on him and he was physically and emotionally abusive,” the volunteer shared.

But forcing the woman to abort her child proved to be an effortless endeavor for the abusive man; he took her from the pregnancy center to the abortion mill, and the child was dead within hours of their encounter. Abortion is portrayed as a woman’s right – an inviolable badge of her autonomy and freedom. And yet, every day countless women are forced and coerced into unwanted abortions, and the abortionists who operate under the auspices of “women’s rights” do absolutely nothing to counteract these disasters. “Silent complicity with abusive boyfriends is not what feminism has fought for,” said the volunteer.

While U.S. pregnancy resource centers have come under intense attack by the anti-Life movement in recent years, they are needed now more than ever. If this is the era of feminism – equality of the sexes – pregnancy resource centers are the hallmark of that age. Pregnancy centers are a singular refuge offering real compassion and concern without Big Abortion’s profit-driven tactics, which only come to fruition in the suctioning of children from their mothers’ wombs. “Women in the 21st Century should not feel they have to enter this secret world where ‘their mistake’ can be ‘fixed’, no questions asked,” the volunteer concludes. “They should feel that those who are putting pressure on them will be held accountable and that they have control over their lives.”